Summer Exhibitions – Opening Night

Contemporary at Blue Star invites the public to the opening of our three new exhibitions: The C&’s Center of Unfinished Business, Kaysaypac: Portraits and Figures by Leeanna Chipana, and Cheng Xinhao’s Silver…and Other Elements. The Contemporary is always free and open to the public.

The C&s Center of Unfinished Business

Contemporary is thrilled to partner with C&, a multimedia platform for contemporary visual arts, to present The Center of Unfinished Business, a reading room that encapsulates an array of books that explore the persistence of colonialism in various ways, from its origins to how it effects people and places today. You’ll find texts on the way land and culture have been forcibly stripped from native people due to colonialism alongside texts that explore how empire-building also connects to fashion, 21^st century capitalism, and more.

Kaysaypac: Portraits and Figures by Leeanna Chipana

Born in Long Island, New York to an immigrant Quechuan-Peruvian father and American mother, Leeanna Chipana draws from her Quechuan and American identity by incorporating Incan, Aztec, and Mayan iconography with classical European oil painting techniques and approaches. The blending and blurring of indigenous figures and Western techniques is an effort of disrupting colonial erasure by placing Indigenous-Latinx figures at the forefront of a very Euro-centric style of painting.

Cheng Xinhao
Silver…and Other Elements

In this four-channel film, Cheng Xinhao investigates the Mang people’s (the indigenous people living at the border of Vietnam and China) adaptation to shifting borders and changing systems. To explore this moving borderline and the migration of its people, Xinhao follows the fluctuating use of currency.